System City

Book excerpt: A radical shift is taking place in the way that society is thinkingabout cities, a change from the machine metaphors of the 20thcentury to mathematical models of the processes of biological andnatural systems. From this new perspective, cities are regarded notsimply as spatially extended material artefacts, but as complexsystems that are analogous to living organisms, exhibiting many ofthe same characteristics. There is an emerging view that the designof the thousands of new cities needed for an expanding worldpopulation are to be founded on intelligent and inhabitedinfrastructural systems or ‘flow architectures’ ofurban metabolisms. The physical arrays of the flow architecture ofthe city are intimately connected to the networks of subsidiarysystems that collect and distribute energy, materials andinformation. They animate the city, and should therefore beintimately coupled to the spatial and cultural patterns of life inthe city, to the public spaces through which people flow, andshould unite rather than divide urban morphological and ecologicalsystems. Featured architects: AMID(cero9), Buro Happold, Foster +Partners, Groundlab and SOM. Contributors include: Joan Busquets, Kate Davies and Liam Young,Mehran Gharleghi, Evan Greenberg and George Jeronimidis, MarinaLathouri, Wolf Mangelsdorf, Daniel Segraves, Jack Self, RicardSolé and Sergi Valverde, and Iain Stewart.